So Reddit consists of 97-99% of users rarely contributing to the discussion, just passively consuming the content generated by the other 1-3%. This is a pretty consistent trend in Internet communities and is known as the [1% rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)).

But there's more, because not all the users who post do so with the same frequency. The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users. From this 2006 article:

Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. According to Wikipedia's "about" page, it has only 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. alone.

Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule.

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Participation inequality exists in many places on the web. A quick glance at Amazon.com, for example, showed that the site had sold thousands of copies of a book that had only 12 reviews, meaning that less than 1% of customers contribute reviews.

Furthermore, at the time I wrote this, 167,113 of Amazons book reviews were contributed by just a few "top-100" reviewers; the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. How anybody can write that many reviews — let alone read that many books — is beyond me, but it's a classic example of participation inequality.

I don't know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That's just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it's a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account's description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the "verified purchase" tag on all of them, which also means he's probably actually reading them.

The only explanation for this behavior is that he is insane. I mean, normal people don't do that. We read maybe 20 books a year, tops, and we probably don't write reviews on Amazon for all of them. There has to be something wrong with this guy.

So it goes with other websites. One of Wikipedia's power users, Justin Knapp, had been submitting an average of 385 edits per day since signing up in 2005 as of 2012. Assuming he doesn't sleep or eat or anything else (currently my favored prediction), that's still one edit every four minutes. He hasn't slowed down either; he hit his one millionth edit after seven years of editing and is nearing his two millionth now at 13 years. This man has been editing a Wikipedia article every four minutes for 13 years. He is insane, and he has had a huge impact on what you and I read every day when we need more information about literally anything. And there are more like him; there is one user with 2.7 million edits and many others with more than one million. Note that some of them joined later than Knapp and therefore might have higher rates of edits, but I don't feel like computing it.

Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja) films himself playing video games for people to watch for 12 hours per day:

The schedule is: 9:30 is when I start in the morning and then I play until 4, so that’s like six, six-and-a-half hours,” Blevins said. “Then I’ll take a nice three- to four-hour break with the wife, the dogs or family — we have like family nights, too — and then come back on around 7 o’clock central until like 2, 3 in the morning. The minimum is 12 hours a day, and then I’ll sleep for less than six or seven hours.”

And he's been more or less doing that since 2011, even though he only started bringing in big bucks recently.

He's less prominent now, but YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of videos without watching them. Maybe he's not quite insane, but he's clearly interacting the site in a way that's different than most people, essentially optimizing for comment likes.

If you read reviews on Amazon, you're mostly reading reviews written by people like Grady Harp. If you read Wikipedia, you're mostly reading articles written by people like Justin Knapp. If you watch Twitch streamers, you're mostly watching people like Tyler Blevins. And if you read YouTube comments, you're mostly reading comments written by people like Justin Young. If you consume any content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways.

I don't really know what to do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth keeping in mind when using the Internet.

Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.

Interesting. Regarding wikipedia, IIRC most of those super-prolific editors weren't contributing content, but rather fixed wording, markup syntax etc, often heavily using bots (which explains one edit every four minutes). On the other hand, they still spend their entire lives on it, and do have an outsized clout in any discussions about controversies etc.

And if you read YouTube comments, you're mostly reading comments written by people like Justin Young.

That's something I'm particularly not sure about. There's also a lot of usual people commenting. Should be relatively easy to check, I think.

By the way, another related concerning thing about internet communities is the self-organizing part. With point prevalence of schizophrenia being about 0.3-0.5% (higher in younger communities such as reddit), you might expect a natural community of 200-300 people to have one crazy person on average.

A frontpage /r/pics post reaches the eyes of 10,000,000 registered redditors, including 30,000-50,000 schizophrenics. If it somehow speaks to them in particular, maybe even prompts them to organize in a particular subreddit, the result could be one hell of a rabbit hole for an unprepared normie. Our brains have not evolved to deal with self-selected communities where most people are actually insane.

If you're making automated edits with a bot, it's required that it be operated under a separate account name. You're correct that a lot of these edits aren't necessarily content-creating, and some may be bot-assisted, but they do require a human hand pushing a button at the least.

That's only for fully automated edits. Semi-automatic edits can be run under your own account, no problem. If you are doing something like solving disambiguations, I can speak from personal experience when I say it's possible to do an edit a second usefully.

That said, you can still rack up a ton of meaningful content edits if you simply work at it regularly for a few years instead of spending your spare time, say, watching TV/streamers. I had, I think, well over 100,000 WP edits total (it's probably lower now since so many articles I worked on have since been deleted), and only some of them were semi-auto edits.

My point was more that semi-automatic still makes it very easy to be 'super-prolific' and many of the super-prolific editors (such as myself, I think I hit the top 200 at one point) do do it in part by semi-auto editing. I never made it a huge part of my editing, but many do. Requiring a human hand pushing a button is not much of a constraint when you can do that once a second. (There are 86,400 seconds in a single day, after all.)

Check out the "Targeted Individuals" community. Paranoid people sharing their delusions of persecution and affirming each other's. Fairly horrifying. Might still be helpful on net, though, because they do also discuss psychiatric perspecties on their issues that some might otherwise never hear about.

Click on any of their profiles and read their comment or post history... its a DEEP rabbit hole of mental illness... thats a big Y I K E S how easily accessible it is to see behind the curtain and get an impression of how their sickness is affecting their lives.

A frontpage /r/pics post reaches the eyes of 10,000,000 registered redditors, including 30,000-50,000 schizophrenics. If it somehow speaks to them in particular, maybe even prompts them to organize in a particular subreddit, the result could be one hell of a rabbit hole for an unprepared normie. Our brains have not evolved to deal with self-selected communities where most people are actually insane.

You know there are tons of subs like this the_donald, incels, braincels, ricels, etc...

You're so worked up over politics you can't help but sneak a political attack in a thread discussing internet commenting habits and don't have the self-reflection to see that you're exactly the kind of strangely emotionally over involved outlier that is currently being discussed.

But by your standard, commenting on their comment reveals your own emotional over-investment. The irony flows both directions.

Personally, I disagree with the standard you are putting forward. I think this topic of internet commenting habits has very obvious implications for online political discussion, and I don't think that drawing that connection makes either one of you "emotionally over-involved".

Not really, except in the sense that anyone commenting at all is an "outlier."

Nothing in this conversation was politically charged up till the parent commenter's sudden "LOL the_donald are crazy incels" post, which expresses the emotive insanity mentioned by the OP very well. As would an equally off topic post going "LOL r/politics are all hysterical betas"

I think your reading of the intention of their comment is revealing. I read it as examples of communities which are emotionally over-invested self-selected echo chambers. Your instinctive response to the_donald being included on such a list seems to be a combination of "nuh-uh they're not incels" (which wasn't the point) and "they didn't mention r/politics too so this comment is an emotionally immature political attack". Yet your balking at their mention of t_d is apolitically motivated and above question?

If you'd bothered to read the initial post, you would see there was no discussion regarding "emotionally over-invested self-selected echo chambers."

The subject was "self-selected communities where most people are actually insane", which the parent comment tried to classify a particular political subreddit as part of, then tried to tarnish, by association, that sub with various sexually frustrated, etc., other subs.

A clear and simple partisan rhetorical attack that you have to be stupid not to see. I merely responded by highlighting the partisanship, and pointing out that making such a political conversation out of the blue demonstrates a clear and extreme obsession with that topic and side of the debate. Pretty simple and obvious. Unless, of course, you are playing dumb for rhetorical reasons, which you clearly are.